


Sulfuric

by yttan



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bela was awesome and I miss her, Character Study, Dean torturing Bela in hell was so RIGHT THERE and so here you have it, Gen, post-season 3, pre-season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 01:47:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13730523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yttan/pseuds/yttan
Summary: Hell has been characterized in many ways.





	Sulfuric

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't really been in the Supernatural fandom in years, but had a sudden wave of love for Bela Talbot and so here we are. I'd love to expand this at some point, but don't know what seasons/episodes to rewatch to spark some inspiration.

Hell has been characterized in many ways: lick of flame; snap of bone; the bloody taste of sin unhinging unrepentant souls. 

Bela would characterize it like this: a raw scream.

Part of her had expected hell to go about turning damned souls into demons like a factory line went about producing candy bars. Formal and efficient, a whole lot of agony but not much fuss. Maybe a few cockroach legs here and there. In with the humans, out with the sentient agents of evil. Minus the formality and efficiency, she wasn’t far off. 

Hell resembled cold storage, without the cold. Chains spiderwebbed as far as the eye could see. Strung up on hooks, bodies dangled above the humid, stinking abyss. The chains yanked and swayed, eliciting fresh yells and whimpers with every breath. It was a largely solitary, stewing experience. There was a unique place of pain for all, and many shed their humanity to become demons without much more help. For the rest, one-on-one torture time with the already initiated whittled away at the remaining humanity.

When Bela wasn’t left snared and alone, she was unhooked and dragged to a small, bare, stone room and joined by whoever had drawn her ticket for the day.

At least a few times, the question “why?” must have sobbed out between Bela’s screams, because sometimes she got an answer.

“Practice,” explained one demon as he sharpened a knife with quick, precise motions.

“Fun,” said another before she sunk her fingers into Bela’s flesh.

The physical wounds healed; they were only a soul remembering what a body felt like, after all. The desperation and fear never left.

There was no day and night, but it felt like years had rolled by with nothing but eternity stretched out waiting for Bela.

\--

Like the hush before snowfall, hell became still in the moments before the siege. Souls looked about in fear, or hope, or chaotic confusion. Demons tasted the air and found it changed, impossibly changed. Those rare few old enough to remember the taste coiled their smokey forms into knots inside their meat suits, prepared for either fight or flight.

After the hush, the first noise was like a vacuum unsealing: a  _ whoosh _ and a  _ pop _ followed by a  _ snick _ and a  _ clatter _ .

The first demons fell like snow. Their bodies soft, their vision blinded by white.

Those left roared like hellfire and surged to meet the angels. They were woefully unprepared, but they had fear, desperate survival instinct, and wild confusion on their side. It was no match for the precision and single-minded determination they crashed against.

The heavenly host had one goal: reach Dean Winchester and rip him from hell’s grasp before he started the apocalypse.

Hell only needed to stop them long enough to ensure the first apocalyptic domino fell.

\--

Bela was in session when the siege began. She was one of the souls too occupied by searing pain to notice the atmospheric shift.

The only shift Bela felt had occurred earlier, when Dean Winchester had stalked into her stone-carved, prison cell of a torture suite.

“Dean?” There had been a time when a look of intent on Dean’s face might have been a turn on, but that time was long past. Now it sent altogether different shivers down her spine. 

Dean did not respond, but his lips pursed and he approached the table laid out with implements of torture. The silence was claustrophobic, marred only by the metallic clicks of obscured instruments.

In her final moments he had promised he’d see her again and she had recognized it for the threat that it was. Picking up a blade and advancing on her was only following through.

Bela took a deep breath and stared him down. “Do your worst.”

Shackles scraped bloody circles into her wrists and held her tight against the rough rock wall. When Bela so much as shifted, the chains holding her arms up rattled and blood seeped more urgently from her wounds. The restraints were the least of the torture.

The last notes of her scream faded into sobs, then the sobs into a laugh. “Surely you can do better than that, Dean.”

To his credit, Dean almost managed to stop his mouth from curling into a snarl.

“You were such a righteous bastard in life. Tell me,” Bela’s body lurched around a wet cough, “what’s your excuse for this?”

He didn’t respond, just turned his back to her and busied himself with a tray of tools.

If Bela were the hopeful type, she might have called his expression tortured. Encouraged by that potential, she goaded on with as lofty a lilt as she could manage. “Too good to fuck me, but not to fuck me over, I guess.”

Dean let out a grunt. “You fucked yourself over,  _ Abby _ .”

“He speaks!” Dean turned around, his face impassive, wielding a knife laced with something slick and black that Bela couldn’t identify. She suspected she didn’t want to. “Any other words of wisdom before you–”

Whatever was on the blade burned with a fire that left her breathless, torso curling into itself in a useless protective instinct. Her knees buckled, jarring the stab site and yanking fresh pain into her wrists that she was too otherwise occupied to really feel. What she could feel was the crackle of the substance reacting with something in her body, surging heat and bubbling the flesh around the wound. Reality slipped for a moment, blurring and blending between black and white and the distant sound of Dean’s voice.

“Just turn,” he urged. He sounded tired, Bela noted somewhere in the receding edge of her consciousness. One hand held the blade in place in Bela’s abdomen, the other was gentle on Bela’s throat, easing her back against the wall. She could feel the knife sliding and slicing inside her with the movement. “We both know you were an evil bitch topside, you don’t need to pretend otherwise.”

Bela shuddered, trying and failing to swallow down a whimper of agony. “So jealous – I lasted longer than you down here.”

The hand around her throat tightened. Actual pain was etched in Dean’s face, the soul-deep kind that gave Bela the strength she needed to grin up at him. Sweat dripped into her eyes and she could feel blood running down her chin.

The knife twisted, the hand tightened, and a whining pitch drowned the room white around Bela.

Only the clatter of the knife falling to the ground made her realize that the searing white light and percussive noise was not her losing consciousness, and Dean’s hand was no longer on her throat.

Three things happened at once: the room clapped into sudden technicolor, making Bela and Dean blink violently; Bela’s shackles released, letting her limp body crumple to the ground; and as she fell she saw what she thought was a molten splay of wings folding into the humanoid shape of a man.

When Bela’s vision refocused, the being standing in the doorway looked anguished. 

“We are too late.”

Bela stared from the floor with her jaw agape.

Dean stared too, stunned into inaction but not silence.

“What the fuck.”

The rustle of feathers – no, a trench coat –  _ no, feathers  _ – followed footsteps that stopped in front of her. Their eyes locked, and unbidden hope broke free from Bela’s grasp.

If it looked like a rescue and walked like a rescue.

It could be a rescue.

_ She could be rescued.  _

All her mistakes to achieve freedom in life had landed her trapped in hell, but mere inches from her stood something inexplicable. Somehow she sensed, deep down in every remaining piece of her soul, that whatever this thing was, he could get her out.

Her runaway hope did not live long.

With devastation in his eyes, the being reached for Dean’s shoulder, and with a rending noise that quaked stones loose from the walls and knives off their platter, they were gone.

Nothing Dean could have done to Bela cut so deep.

With a scream that echoed, echoed, echoed, Bela let herself be consumed by sulfur.


End file.
